Monday, January 19th

This was the beginning of many early morning days for all of us. Wake up call was at 5AM to get to breakfast at a mall food court called Crystal City. They had a pretty good breakfast buffett set up for the kids, and we only had one kid pass out and needed a 9-1-1 phone call. haha! (the student was fine by the way... think she was just dehydrated)... which seems to happen quite a bit.

Anyway, after our morning meal, we were off to Arlington. I love going to Arlington and teaching the students all about the services they have there, watching the tomb of the unknown soldier, seeing Kennedy's grave... the list goes on... there is so much history there. One of my favorite parts was when it started snowing... some of the delegates had never seen snow before so, it was awesome to see their reactions to it. The picture below shows them trying to eat it, but you can't really see the snow.

I think the students got a lot out of their experience at Arlington and seemed to really appreciate everything that was there, which is not always the case from the delegates.

After Arlington we went to one of my favorite Memorials, the FDR Memorial. This is the first time I had seen this memorial in the winter... all the waterfalls were frozen, but it was still absolutely beautiful. I do hope I get there again in the Spring when I come back over Spring break for my next People to People trip. Students said with all the quotes all over the memorial, they felt they learned a lot about FDR and what he stood for. I did learn that he really did not want a memorial built in his honor, but there was an organization representing the disabled who raised money in honor of him and had this built anyway.

Once we finished touring the FDR memorial, we had lunch at the Ronald Reagan building where students had to go through security just to get into the building. They didn't quite understand why we had to do that, so I just told them it was a top secret-security lunch. They seemed satisfied with that answer! :) Once we were finished with lunch, we went to the National Portrait Gallery. My favorite picture was the one of the liscense plates... see if you can make out what they are saying.

Mount Vernon was our next stop on the tour for the day. This is another favorite site of mine. The line to get into the main house was too long, but we walked around the estate. our first stop was the greenhouse where "Dr. Craig" talked to us about being General Washington's doctor and his best friend. Our DM asked him, "Well, I hate to bring this up, but how do you defend yourself when it seems you are the one ultimately responsible for Washington's death?" Talk about AKWARD!! Well, he went on to explain how he cut open Washington and bled him. First one pint, then two, then three, then four. Well by the time her got to four one of my boys went completely WHITE and I had to remove him from the Greenhouse. In fact, we thought he had passed out, but he swears he didn't. Made for an interesting afternoon. The view from the back of the estate is beautiful!!!

To end the day, we ate at the old Country Buffett, which really excited the kids for some odd reason and then we went to the Iwo Jima Memorial. It was pretty cold out so the students only lasted about 5 or ten minutes before they were ready to leave. The picture that this memorial was based on was a Pulitzer Prize winning photo. You can try to make out the explanation of it all below.